Sydney: five bells, one harbour, seven bridges. A bridge is the ultimate romantic symbol, crystallising in steel and concrete the yearning to connect disparate worlds - and Sydney, city of baroque waterways, is as fully (if not as glamorously) bridged as London, Stockholm or Prague.

Yet as the old year ticks over into the new, just one bridge counts. One question plays on the collective unconscious: in what crazy garb - the gold lamé´, the pyrotechnic sequins, the Zulu headdress - will the Harbour Bridge appear?

You'd almost think it was our only bridge, so strongly does it connect not just the two shores of our drowned river but our psychic selves to our global image.

But while we gaze fondly on The Bridge, many of our lesser bridge treasures suffer terminal neglect.

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This is a tale of four bridges - old and new, threatened and screwed.

Oldest first, and saddest. Windsor Bridge, built 1874, is the oldest extant Hawkesbury crossing. The square from which it springs - Thompson Square, 1795 - is still older. A rare remaining Georgian space, it is the oldest public square in the country. Yet the government wants to destroy both, asap.

When Thompson Square was built, Windsor was still the village of Green Hills. The name change came in 1811, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie adopted it as one of his five Hawkesbury towns.

Windsor Bridge is individually listed in the Hawkesbury local environment plan and the state register. Even the Roads and Maritime Service (RMS) calls it "highly significant". The Government Architect describes the project's level of impact on a dozen or more heritage properties as "very high".

The square, says the Heritage Council, is "of crucial importance to the heritage of the state". The Government Architect's office says it reflects "Macquarie's visionary schemes for town planning excellence in the infant colony".

Windsor is a small 1600-person town, and heritage is definitely an outré´ issue. But in July, hundreds watched a thunder of horsemen cross the bridge under the Eureka Flag to highlight the bridge's plight, and in November the Community Action for Windsor Bridge (CAWB) group presented state Parliament with a 12,000-signature petition.

Yet the O'Farrell government proceeds apace to demolish the bridge and rebuild a high level four-lane concrete monster that will queue B-doubles and mining trucks through the town and relegate what is left of the square to a siding.

It needn't be this way. There are options. CAWB's preferred alternative is to move the bridge downstream and repair the existing bridge for local traffic. The government insists on costing this repair at $18 million, but CAWB's own detailed report by Brian Pearson and Ray Wedgwood - two former state chief bridge engineers with 80 years' bridge-design experience between them - makes it $4 million.

A bypass would save the town, as it has saved Berry, but the government would rather bypass due process, cynically declaring the project ''state significant'' - you do recall how passionately Barry O'Farrell opposed Part 3A? - to preclude jurisdiction of the Environment Minister and the Heritage Council.

Not that the Heritage Council is that crash-hot either when it comes to protecting heritage, even when it does hold sway.

Take lovely Lennox Bridge, the butterfly-hinge at the heart of Parramatta. In October, the Heritage Council - our supposed big defender of heritage - ignored advice from its own expert heritage branch that proposed changes would "seriously and irrevocably compromise" the 1830s convict-hewn structure, and approved two ugly square passageways through the bridge abutments.

Far from damaging the ancient fabric, the council's architect-chairman Lawrence Nield argued, the intervention would increase the bridge's heritage value.

Parramatta desperately needs to reconnect with its river. Bankside pedestrian and cycle paths to this end are a good thing, and plenty of graceful ancient stone bridges allow just such passages through their abutments. But blind Freddie can see that any holes so punched must be arch-headed masonry and couched in the same load-bearing language as the lovely Lennox itself.

Must we spell it out? Authenticity counts for nothing if it's hideous. And the urge to spend federal dollars by budget's end must not be the driver here.

On the other hand, if the feds have spare dough, they could usefully lavish it on bridge three, the old Glebe Island Bridge, 1903. A marvel of late-Victorian engineering, upstaged by the Anzac Bridge in 1995 and unfunded since, it is being allowed to rot because of the plastic mega-boat push that regards Sydney Harbour as its own property.

This bridge was designed by engineer Percy Allan as the improved non-identical twin of the now much-loved Pyrmont Bridge. So innovative was its electrically-pivoting centre-span that in 1907 Allan was invited to address the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.

Yet it remains unlisted, despite the National Trust's urging, because the Heritage Council is dragging the chain. The same arguments apply now as in 1988 when the Pyrmont Bridge was saved, and the same benefits would accrue - a lovely object, a splendid commuter path, a new urban connect.

But for years rumours have circulated - and they are reinforced by the Heritage Council's risible reluctance to list - that the RMS wants the bridge gone. Ratbags all.

Bridge-the-fourth is that to Cockatoo Island, yet unbuilt. The idea has been around for yonks, resurfacing at the recent Sydney Biennale. Some even say - but I have yet to see hard copy - such a bridge once existed.

Certainly, arguments would abound as to level - high or floating - and route (it's 400 metres from Balmain, 300 from Woolwich or 1200 from Drummoyne).

But the point is surely this. What an opportunity to establish a thriving sustainable-arts island and glorious transport object, worthy of the Thames or Seine, to grace our Sydney Harbour dreaming. Only connect.

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